Guinness Global Public Square

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9565-6
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Logos Bookstores' Best Book in Christianity and Culture How do we live with our deepest differences? In a world torn by religious conflict, the threats to human dignity are terrifyingly real. Some societies face harsh government repression and brutal sectarian violence, while others are divided by bitter conflicts over religion's place in public life. Is there any hope for living together peacefully? Os Guinness argues that the way forward for the world lies in promoting freedom of religion and belief for people of all faiths and none. He sets out a vision of a civil and cosmopolitan global public square, and how it can be established by championing the freedom of the soul-the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience and religion. In particular he calls for leadership that has the courage to act on behalf of the common good. Far from utopian, this constructive vision charts a course for the future of the world. Soul freedom is not only a shining ideal but a dire necessity and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of our time. We can indeed maximize freedom and justice and learn to negotiate deep differences in public life. For a world desperate for hope at a critical juncture of human history, here is a way forward, for the good of all.

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Impossible People, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guinness, Os

Leseproben

1

The Golden Key

Soul Freedom for All

We are now seven billion humans jostling together on our tiny planet earth, up from a mere two and a half billion in the lifetime of many living today. Small and insignificant perhaps in contrast to the vastness of the cosmos, we face a simple but profound challenge: How do we live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological, and very especially when those differences concern matters of our common public life? In short, how do we create a global public square and make the world safer for diversity?

The answer to this titanic challenge requires an answer to the prior question of who we humans think we are, and then attending closely to the dictates of our humanity. Put differently, we face a triple imperative that will be a key to our human future: First, to see whether we have reason enough to believe in the measureless dignity and worth of every last one of us. Second, to know whether we can discover a way to live with the deepest differences that divide us. Third, to find out whether we are able to settle our deliberations and debates in public life through reasoned persuasion rather than force, intimidation and violence—even in the age of the new media and a global resurgence of religion.

Indispensable to solving these challenges is the extension of soul freedom for all. Soul freedom is the inviolable freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief that alone does full justice to the dictates of our humanity. As we shall see, it best expresses human dignity and agency; it promotes freedom and justice for all; it fosters healthy giving, caring, peaceful and stable societies; and it acts as a bulwark against the countless current abuses of power and the equally countless brutal oppressions of human dignity.

As such, soul freedom concerns the foundational freedom to be human. It is both the expression of a high view of human worth and the answer to a human yearning for freedom that is universal and enduring, as well as the surest bulwark against the darker angels of our nature. Soul freedom rises to the challenge of the dictates of our humanity because it is about nothing less than our freedom and responsibility to be fully human and to live together in thriving and beneficial communities, and at the same time to know how to lean against the crooked timber that is also at the heart of our humanity.

Soul freedom for all was once attacked as naive and utopian, and it is still resisted as subversive. Yet it is not only a shining ideal but a dire necessity today and an eminently practical solution to the predicaments of our time. Truly it is the golden key to a troublesome situation in which the darker angels must not be allowed to dominate.

For as the present world situation shows only too clearly, the emerging global era is a time of deep anxieties and fears for governments, groups and individuals. Out of this state of mind many follies and some great dangers and disasters are growing, and we are not far removed from the false and barbarously inhuman answers of the twentieth century. The natural personal desire for certainty and the natural government and group desire for unity can each in their way be twisted into overreaching demands for uniformity, and then into a remorseless slide toward coercive conformity that too often ends with raw power as the abuser of human freedom, justice, security and well-being. Add to this the clash of religions and ideologies, the cacophony of the new media, and the high-octane dimension of prejudice and hatred, and the combination can be lethal.

Against all such abuses, whether by governments, religions, ideologies, tyrants, bureaucrats, university administrators, towering individual egos or some politically correct orthodoxy of one kind or another, this work is a passionate cry for soul freedom for all—for every single person on the earth—and a call to see how its freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief may be advanced in the world of today and tomorrow for the sake of the true dictates of our humanity.

Soul freedom for all stands as the supreme challenge to all contemporary forms of dictatorship of the mind and heart, whether secularist totalitarianism of the Chinese and North Korean kind, or religious authoritarianism of the Iranian, Saudi and Burmese kind. As such, soul freedom is as realistic as it is idealistic. It speaks to the best and guards against the worst of human nature. It not only stands against open dictatorships but mounts a clear warning to all the rising forms of Western illiberalism, especially those that spring from the zealotry of good intentions.

In the short term, soul freedom is essential if there is to be a positive answer to three of the greatest questions shaping the future in the coming century: Will Islam modernize peacefully? Which faith will replace Marxism in China? And will the West sever or recover its roots?

In the long term, soul freedom is crucial to whether there will be an expansion or a rollback of human rights and responsibilities across the earth, and therefore to the prospects for freedom, justice, conscience, human dignity and human well-being itself.

In particular, soul freedom for all must now be freshly understood and advanced in the Western world if it is to hold its indispensable place throughout the whole world. For if the present erosions continue, Western claims about freedom, democracy and progress will slowly be rendered hollow, and the West will be the west in geography only. After all, soul freedom has long been left half-baked and poorly protected in countries such as England, where it was once pioneered, and there are major problems with its status in many countries across Europe.

Yet that is nothing compared with the specter that now looms across the Atlantic. For if soul freedom continues to be neglected and threatened in the United States as it has been recently, it clearly can be endangered anywhere. Fine words are not enough. The wordsmiths of the world have been busy, but statesmen have been absent, lawyers have run amok and activists have trampled the ground carelessly in their rush to press their own interests. Only wise leadership and courageous action can bring the situation back and lead us forward. The stakes for the world and the future of humanity are incalculable.

The immensity of the issue has been created by the clash of three trends that every concerned citizen of the world must recognize and confront:

• First, there is now solid and incontrovertible evidence that when freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief is recognized, respected and advanced for citizens of all faiths and none, there is a parallel advance in many important social goods, such as peace, stability, social cohesion, generosity, enterprise and the unleashing of the positive forces of civil society.1
• Second, there is equally strong but contrary evidence that restrictions on this foundational human right are a mounting problem across most of the nations of the world, including countries that were once the leading champions of this freedom.2 The plain fact is that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people believe strongly in someone or something higher than human, yet the overwhelming majority of them do not have the freedom to practice their faith freely. In 2010, for the very first time, the United States moved into the top sixteen countries of the world where there was a rise in both government restrictions and social hostility toward religion.3
• Third, the greatest current obstacle to resolving these contradictory trends is a surprising one. The menace to religious freedom is no longer just the age-old evils of authoritarian oppression and sectarian violence around the world, but a grave new menace from within the West itself. For we are seeing an unwitting convergence between some very different Western trends that together form a perfect storm. One trend is the general disdain for religion that leads to a discounting of religious freedom, sharpened by a newly aggressive atheism and a heavy-handed separationism that both call for the exclusion of religion from public life. Another is the overzealous attempt of certain activists of the sexual revolution to treat freedom of religion and belief as an obstruction to their own rights that must be dismantled forever. Yet another is the sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle initiatives of certain advocates of Islam to press their own claims in ways that contradict freedom of religion and belief, and freedom of speech as it has been classically understood. (Current Western forms of hate speech, for example, operate in a similar way to the blasphemy laws put forward on behalf of Islam, and they are equally misguided.) Each of these trends represents a serious crisis in itself. But when considered together, and especially in light of the generally maladroit governmental responses, they are also a window into the decline of the West.

In 2015, the world will celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, the iconic charter of English liberties imposed upon King John at Runnymede in 1215. Winston Churchill described it as “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.”4 But if the celebration is not to be hollow, we must use the occasion to assess the current dangers and obstacles to freedom, take stock of our liberties and rights, and see where we have slipped and where we need to advance, even in the lands that once pioneered these precious and essential human freedoms.

The...